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mtpalms wrote:

PS: Is it alright to get online anyway? I have bank downloads, bill paying, and other bookkeeping to do for my clients.

To be 100% honest, if you're behind a router and not visiting shady sites, you're fine.

Booksley wrote:

mtpalms wrote:

PS: Is it alright to get online anyway? I have bank downloads, bill paying, and other bookkeeping to do for my clients.

To be 100% honest, if you're behind a router and not visiting shady sites, you're fine.

The only possibly shady stuff I do are taper shows, and I do that on the MBP

I'm careful on the PC where I go, but I'm leery that I may click on an innocent looking link that redirects me to something foul. Better safe than sorry, but I'll go ahead and get back to work.

I do still want to get the Symantec stuff either gone or disabled though so I can install Avast!.

Now I understand why people say Norton is worse than the viruses it supposedly protects you from.

Last edited by mtpalms (2008-06-11 11:32 am)

mtpalms wrote:

I have one last question but it's kind of off topic:

I haven't upgraded to spk3 because, like I mentioned beofre I inherited this machine from my late boss, and it is registered under his name. Does it require a password? Is it terribly important to make this upgrade?

Don't think it needs a PW per se, but it likely requires Admin access. If there's plenty of disc space, I'd do it, but from the full 316MB DL rather than Windows Update. Not vital to upgrade, but better.

Sorry I couldn't do more with that then. I'm still busy.

Anyway, I think I found out the why of AVG 8.0's increased resource usage.

Early last month, webmasters here at The Reg noticed an unexpected spike in our site traffic. Suddenly, we had far more readers than ever before, and they were reading at a record clip. Visits actually doubled on certain landing pages, and more than a few ho-hum stories attracted an audience worthy of a Pulitzer Prize winner. Or so it seemed.

As it turns out, much of this traffic was driven by the new malware scanner from AVG Technologies.

Six months ago, AVG acquired Exploit Prevention Labs and its Linkscanner, a tool that automatically scans search engine results before you click on them. If you search Google, for instance, and ten results turn up, it visits all ten links to ensure they're malware free.

Then, in late April, AVG rolled Linkscanner into its anti-virus engine, which has about 70 million active users worldwide. The company estimates that 20 million machines have upgraded to the tool's new incarnation, AVG version 8, and this has already cooked up enough ghost clicks to skew traffic not only on The Reg but any number of other sites as well.

Adam Beale, who runs a UK-based internet consultancy, says that across his small stable of clients, traffic has spiked as much as 80 per cent on some sites. And this is more than just an inconvenience. After all, sites live and die by their traffic numbers. And net resources aren't free.

"Although [the AVG Linkscanner] might be good for the security of users, it's a real pain for website owners and webmasters," Beale tells us, having blogged about this growing problem. "It's causing people to think their traffic is increasing, costing those who pay for bandwidth, and wasting disk space with large amounts of unnecessary lines in log files."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/13 … c_numbers/

Good to know, I'm still running AVG 7.5 at home and was delaying updating to Ver8 or jumping to another app altogether.